Orbital, a Los Angeles-based startup founded by former e-scooter entrepreneur Euwyn Poon, has raised a $5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun accelerator to develop orbital data centers capable of running AI inference workloads in space.
The company, which counts roughly a dozen employees with experience at SpaceX, Amazon LEO, and Northrop Grumman, is planning a demo flight to test radiation shielding and thermal management for Nvidia Blackwell chips, with a first operational spacecraft targeting 2028. Full-scale deployment depends on SpaceX’s Starship rocket making commercial launches economically viable.
Andreessen Horowitz partner Andrew Chen said Poon’s experience scaling Spin scooters to 250,000 units across 100 cities demonstrated his ability to manage complex operational deployments at the scale an aerospace venture requires.
